Disney announces that it lay off 160 employees from their feature animation unit (Pixar workers are safe) in the next couple of weeks, generously offering newly superfluous employees an opportunity to spend much more time with their families during the holidays. [Variety]
Comedy Central orders six episodes of the Amp'd Mobile-originated animated comedy series Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States, a move that will surely send basic cable copycats scrambling to misguidedly snatch up the rights to whatever wallpapers and ringtones they find on their children's cellphones. [THR]
Foreign audiences once again prove they're not interested in seeing any film (not even the one with the rats going down the toilet!) but Casino Royale, which takes the international box office crown with $44.7 million, raising its worldwide total to $312.4 million. [Variety]
CBS extends David Letterman's contract through 2010, ensuring that Letterman will remain on the air longer than Jay Leno, who will be replaced on the The Tonight Show by Conan O'Brien in 2009 unless he discovers a way to quietly dispose of his youthful usurper. [THR/AP]
· Kevin Spacey finds a leading man for his MIT card-counting pet project 21, relative unknown Jim Sturgess. Spacey will produce, and may opt to play the lead's mentor himself. Please, no "Spacey mentors up-and-coming actor" jokes. You're far too classy for that. [Variety]

MGM and Revolution Studios have devised an inspired strategy for marketing Rocky Balboa, the sixth, not exactly long-awaited installment in the saga of cinema's most celebrated, cauliflower-eared pugilist: dispatching Sylvester Stallone to influential media outlets equipped with quotes depressing enough to both distract potential audience members from the ridiculousness of a premise involving a sexagenarian boxer making a comeback based on an X-box fighting simulation and to recast his participation as a valiant struggle against an industry that forces early retirement upon its aging stars. A melancholy Stallone tells the NY Times, in hopes of inspiring some guilt-induced ticket purchases:

Producer New Line, distributor MGM, and Peter Jackson are locked in an epic battle over who has control over The Hobbit after Jackson declares that he's not willing to talk about directing the film until New Line coughs up the Lord of the Rings profits they've allegedly screwed him out of, while New Line counter-threatens to press on without him, a move that would almost certainly result in global fanboy riots. [Variety]
At the International Emmys, "very concerned" parent Steven Spielberg warns that semen-splattered corpses on CSI and people being sliced in half on Heroes might not necessarily be the best things for children to watch. [THR]
Heroes puts up the best 18-49 demo ratings that NBC's seen all season, throwing a spotlight on the momentum-stopping performance of Studio 60's Very Special Episode on the evils of product placement. [Variety]
· Nearly three years later, the FCC and CBS are still fighting over Janet Jackson's nipple. Thanks a lot, Timberlake. [THR]
Anne Hathaway is "close" to signing on to play Agent 99 to Steve Carrell's Maxwell Smart in Get Smart adaptation for Warner Bros. [Variety]

Variety's Peter Bart, himself once the "nominal" head of United Artists, offers Tom Cruise some unsolicited career advice. Among the tips: Nurture maverick talent. Also: Shut the hell up about the Scientology stuff, and act like the nice Quakers and Mormons who don't shove their religions in Bart's face. [Variety]
Casino Royale shatters the first-day UK box office record for Bond films, bringing in a record $3.2 million. [THR]
· Meanwhile, China's censorship board approves Royale for release, despite fears that the repeated display of Daniel Craig's unclothed torso might cause an unwanted spike in birth rates. [Variety]
· And in former Bond news, Pierce Brosnan takes another spy-related gig, Spy vs Stu, in which he'll play a "handsome, debonair" secret agent out to steal the girlfriend of a fellow vacationer. [THR]
· Hollywood insiders are skeptical that Phillip Morris is sincere in taking out ads in the trades begging studios not to use their cigarette brands in movies, no matter how cool actors look while marketing their tobacco products to a new generation of potential smokers. [Variety]

While scouring the roughly sixteen thousand stories trailing Tom Cruise's unexpected, imminent return to gainful employment this morning, we noticed a lone voice rising from the desert of media analysis, repeatedly countering all the prematurely exuberant chatter about how the actor and producing enforcer Paula Wagner are ready to revive United Artists' legacy, usher in a new, talent-fellating Hollywood Golden Age with their studio gigs, and summon down from the heavens a deluge of investor cash. Not so fast, says our go-to Cruise contrarian:

We realize that Tom Cruise's newly resurrected United Artists is merely a brand within the MGM family, but we still think that his parent studio needs to recognize their historic partnership with the star in dramatic fashion. What better way to celebrate Cruise's incipient moguldom than by erecting a UA water tower atop MGM's headquarters, the kind of iconic structure that already beautifies the property of several competitors' lots? We feel so strongly about the idea that we've devoted a good five or six minutes of our in-house design department's valuable time to conceptualizing such a monument, which would loom intimidatingly over Century City and be visible for miles in every direction, letting the entire town know where Cruise's new moviemaking power is centralized. Failing this, MGM could always opt for something on a smaller scale, like commissioning a tasteful bronze sculpture for their lobby depicting the actor kicking Sumner Redstone in the ass.

· It still hasn't totally sunk in that Tom Cruise is going to be running United Artists. We think we all still need some time with this one. [Variety, THR]
Robert De Niro and 50 Cent are in "final negotiations" to star as partners in cop thriller New Orleans, a project that is screaming out to be immediately reimagined as a Lethal Weapon-style buddy comedy. [THR]
Producer Brian Grazer, Universal, and a dump truck full of cash are close to convincing Spike Lee that a sequel to seemingly self-contained bank heist flick Inside Man is a good idea. [Variety]
Madonna-founded Maverick Films is suing a film production company for stealing its ideas for a movie Maverick is making on the Stanford Prison Experiment, which they themselves originally appropriated from a Psychology 101 college textbook. [THR]
Universal's Rogue Pictures will distribute legendary video-game-adapting hack Paul W.S. Anderson's Castlevania movie. [Variety]

While various Hollywood types anonymously scoffed at Tom Cruise's plan to fund his post-Paramount moviemaking comeback with funds derived from funnel cake sales and spare change lost by patrons hanging upside down in various gravity-defying thrill rides, we always had the feeling [Ed.note—Sure we did!] that Cruise was planning something a little more dramatic. A press release issued this morning has just revealed the shocking news that Cruise is personally—personally!—reviving dormant studio United Artists with producing partner Paula Wagner and MGM. Retreat into the fetal position and shudder in existential fear as you're introduced to Tom Cruise, movie mogul:

· After the studio dabbled in the unsexy world of distributing and marketing "mid-range indie pics," MGM head Harry Sloan is ready to restore The Lion to its rightful place as a mega-budgeted sequel factory that will pump out blockbuster product like new Terminator, Pink Panther, and Hobbitt movies. [Variety]
Spike Lee stretches his creative wings, following up his HBO documentary on the post-Katrina New Orleans with a pilot script for a drama series about post-Katrina New Orleans. [THR]
This weekend's box office take was the lowest of any weekend in three years, a slowdown that experts attribute to "shitty movies that no one wants to see. Especially that Renny Harlin one." [Variety]
Fox orders a presentation of a potential late-night talk show starring The Sopranos' Steven "Bobby Bacala" Schirripa to fill a development void left by the abrupt cancellation of its The Big Pussy Domestic Violence Hour earlier this year. [THR]
As the America's Next Top Model writers strike drags on with no end in sight, WGA members debate whether or not it's a good idea to continue to commit resources to their expensive occupation of the sidewalk outside the Top Model offices. [Variety]

Because it's so late on a Friday that no one in the industry is at their desks, save the assistants carefully polishing and stowing the gleaming surgical instruments with which their bosses tortured them all week, we don't feel so guilty about passing along a really fun, completely unsubstantiated, wildly un-fact-checked rumor we just heard, in which hot-tempered Hollywood legend Harvey Weinstein is planning on folding the still-shiny Weinstein Co. into MGM and then stepping up to run The Lion. We've helpfully created a graphic for you to print out, clip, and produce should you choose to kick around this piece of idle chatter over cocktails this weekend. Happy gossiping!

Macauley Culkin will star with Eliza Dushku in the dark comedy Sex and
Breakfast, which will attempt to coax edgy laughter from the disconnect of watching the Home Alone kid engage in group sex. [Variety]
Be prepared to excuse yourselves for some alone time after getting all worked up by these two sexy trade paper stories about multimedia conglomerate profit reports. [THR, THR ]
Seeking new and exciting ways of delivering episodes of The Hills to a cherished demographic, MTV is buying Y2M, the nation's largest network of online college newspapers. [Variety]
Sony and MGM move ahead with their Pink Panther sequel by hiring a writing team of "newcomers" whose work will eventually be undone by scores of uncredited rewrites. [THR]
Conservative CBS eschews the willy-nilly fall TV season premiere strategy of its crazy whippsnapper competitors, and will instead roll out new episodes of its various series in a single week. [Variety]

At the very real risk that you've seen this before, we are happy to pass along the Fucking Short Version of perhaps our favorite movie of all time. [via Screenhead/Waxy]
The glossies really can't win. Call Reese Witherspoon fat enough to be pregnant, get sued. Call Kate Hudson skinny enough to scare her mom, get sued.
· But at least Kate Hudson never got skinny enough to faint dead away in Kitson.

MGM is inviting the press to its "lavish" Century City offices to unveil up to an 18 picture distribution slate from various indie studios, such as Weinstein Co., Bauer Martinez, and Lakeshore. Junket whores, get ready to get your minds blown by the Sony-powered MGM! [Variety]
Anyone who's spent more than a few minutes watching the Nickelodeon family of channels knows that what their networks really need is some adorable thugging up by the Wayans brothers. [THR]
Crash sells 17,500 DVDs the day after the Oscars. Sure, it's a spike, but is that a lot? We honestly have no idea, and we want to know whether we're supposed to be upset or not. [Variety]
They're just going to keep casting pilots until they run out of actors: John Lithgow goes to the NBC pilot Twenty Good Years, Jay Mohr joins NBC's Community Service, and Justine Bateman signs on with ABC's untitled Patricia Heaton project, which to the best of our knowledge is not about how tasty the steaks at Albertson's are. Yet, anyway—we'll see how the network notes go after the table read. [THR]
It took approximately a decade of regular cellphone use for Stephen King to finally embrace the technology as a murderous plot device in one of his novels, and Dimension far less time to commission a movie version of the idea. But do we really need them to tell us that cellphones turn people into zombies? [Variety]

With everyone on High Hoax Alert in the wake of the James Frey/JT Leroy scandals, the credibility of Rupert Murray's documentary Unknown White Male, about a friend of the director who suddenly developed amnesia, is being questioned. [Variety]
12-time Saturday Night Live host Alec Baldwin is in "final negotiations" to star with Tina Fey in her untitled behind-the-scenes-at-an-SNL-like-show pilot for NBC, which is obviously planning an all-behind-the-scenes-at-an-SNL-like-show programming block, having already ordered 13 episodes of Aaron Sorkin's behind-the-scenes-at-an-SNL-like-show series, Studio 60. [THR]
Gone Baby Gone writer/director Ben Affleck hooks up brother Casey with a role, ensuring that the family will continue to have at least one actor working in Hollywood. [Variety]
2.1 million watch Dick Cheney's post attorney-hunting interview on Fox News, prompting the right-wing news organization to plan a series of sweeps specials in which powerful Republicans shoot people in the face. [THR]
· It's official: the new Bond girl is Eva Green (tip to horny guys: go rent The Dreamers right now, she may never spend 30 percent of a movie naked again), sparing Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen from having to go through with the sex change operation necessary to play both roles convincingly. [Variety]

· Yesterday, there was chatter that Revolution was going down. The details on Rev's "limbo," according to Var: They will release 13 already finished or in-production films via Sony over the next two years, they've ceased development while the studio "tries to figure out its future" (read: bye bye), and Joe Roth is "hammering out" his "future production arrangement" at Sony. And you can stop holding your breath: Rocky Balboa is among the saved projects. [Variety]
· Get ready for some hilarious, improvised bits about bushy mustaches and lisping riffs on the Rough Riders: Robin Williams will play Teddy Roosevelt alongside Ben Stiller in the Fox comedy A Night at the Museum. [THR]
·MGM president Dan Taylor, who oversaw the transition of the studio to Sony, "ankles" the Lion. Really, we never get tired of the ankling. [Variety]
· There is no reason to read any story with the title "'Big Momma' said knock you out." [THR]
· NBC gives a 13 episode commitment to the Aaron Sorkin/Thomas Schlamme behind-the-scenes-at-an-SNLesque-show series, which has lost the name Studio 7, but gained Matthew Perry, Steven Weber, and DL Hughley as stars. [Variety]

· Variety does its best to sift through the continuing fallout from Paramount's DreamWorks acquisition. Paramount insiders deny that Brad Grey #2 Gail Berman's job is already at stake (despite the loud whisper of the moment that she might be axed and replaced by DW producer Walter Parkes, but shhhh, that's just a nasty rumor). And as for the problem of redundancy in jobs across DreamWorks and Paramount, "department heads from both studios were required to turn over names of employees in their division. The lists are being combed over to see which employee is a stronger candidate, the current Paramount employee or the DreamWorks staffer." After five minutes of dramatic head-scratching and thoughtful harumphing, the Paramount list will be run through a shredder and offices will be cleared to make way for the DW staffers. It's nonstop fun and excitement on the Melrose lot! [Variety]
· NBC will air a record 416 hours of Winter Olympics coverage across its many networks, meaning that you, the incredibly bored viewer, might not miss a single minute of people in spandex sliding down ice chutes in a dizzying variety of positions. [THR]
· Reclusive move star Julia Roberts considers returning to her long abandoned career to star opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War, possibly for her Closer director Mike Nichols. If she's going to hand the twins over to a nanny to go back to work, she's not gonna fuck around. [Variety]
· With just weeks until shooting, the producers of the new, Daniel Craig-starring Bond remake Casino Royale are sleeping with actresses as fast as they can to find a new Bond Girl. [Variety]
· FX has already purchased the cable rights to 2006 summer blockbuster-to-be Superman Returns for a reported $17-25 million. guaranteeing the network first crack at cramming the Bulge of Steel onto the small screen. [Variety]

Despite the fact that Daniel "New Bond" Craig's Munich is a Spielberg film playing in about 1,500 theaters and Pierce "Old Bond" Brosnan's The Matador is an entry from Sundance in January just now making its way into 28, ABC News thinks we should all look at this weekend as some kind of Bond-off between the two actors. Brosnan, however, doesn't want to take the bait:

· Studios fear that SAG's intramural executive bloodbath might indicate that the guild might not bend over so readily in future negotiations, perhaps even getting so uppity as to follow through on a work stoppage. The studios, however, will happily detonate a nuclear device and wipe out all of Hollywood before sharing any more DVD revenues, no matter how many people SAG replaces. [Variety]
· Tired of pussy-footing around their world domination ambitions with such society-destabilizing programs as Who's Your Daddy?, Fox announces its plans to Destroy All Humans. Rupert Murdoch will not stop until every last one of us is a smoldering pile of ash. [THR]
· MGM board member Harry Sloan is named new chariman and CEO of the studio, plans to focus on producing more original content if he can figure out how to fill out corporate parent Sony's utterly confusing paperwork. [Variety]
· Desperate NBC is so grateful to My Name is Earl star Jason Lee for starring in a bright spot in the desolation of their primetime schedule that they've agreed to let him develop shows of his own. [THR]
·ABC picks up a script and five script outlines of the reality TV parody America's Next Muppet, in which viewers may actually get the chance to choose a new felt star. The newest Muppet will immediately be written into a six-show arc as Nicolette Sherdian's latest love interest on Desperate Housewives. [Variety]

· Joe "Narc and Five Minutes on Mission: Impossible 3" Carnahan will co-write and direct a film about 17 year-old, boy-next-door prodigy/drug kingpin Will Wright. The project is described as a "a crooked coming-of-age tale in the style of Catch Me if You Can." Somewhere, Leonardo DiCaprio is shaving his entire body and re-learning how to make his voice crack. [Variety]
· Warner Bros. is testing a digital film distribution and exhibition system in Japan; if all goes well, movies will be transmitted to the black market over 400 percent faster than previously possible. [THR]
· Warner Independent refuses to release the Strangers with Candy movie over fear that the producers didn't secure all the needed rights; insiders suspect that Warner Bros is still crapping its pants over a $17.5 million hit they took over a similar Dukes of Hazzard issue. We suspect that the movie is too awesome to ever see the light of day. [Variety]
· In the most confusing ratings report we've ever read, it seems that everyone did well on Monday night. [THR]
· British tabloids continue to exhaust the world with talk that Daniel Craig will become the first "Blond Bond," news that would finally crush Hugh Jackman's dream of being the first "Don't Ask, Don't Tell Bond." [Variety]

· Gone are the days when Oscar winners were too afraid to drive their Bentleys through the dangerous ghettos of episodic television, as Charlize Theron will cruise through the rapidly gentrified neighborhood of Arrested Development for a five episode arc as a potential love interest for Jason Bateman's character. The days of lazy extended metaphors, however, are still with us. [Variety]
· Million Dollar Baby and Crash scribe Paul Haggis's heavy-handed gifts are sought out by Sony/MGM, who've signed him on for a rewrite of the James Bond pic Casino Royale. Can't wait for his version of that iconic line, "Bond. James Bond. James, like the king, and B-O-N-D—oh, shall I just write it down for you?" [THR]
· Producer Saul Zaentz, original Lord of the Rings rights-holder, reportedly squeezes another $20 million out of New Line in settling a lawsuit over the LOTR trilogy's royalties. [Variety]
· Cheri Oteri joins the cast of thousands of Richard "Donnie Darko" Kelly's Southland Tales as a "villainous lesbian bodybuilder." Strangely, we've always pictured her this way. [THR]
· Universal signs up The 40 Year-Old Virgin's Judd Apatow to write and direct another "offbeat romantic comedy," which will star longtime (Freaks and Geeks/Undeclared) muse Seth Rogen and semi-muses Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. We have to admit, a Seth Rogen vehicle sounds kind of awesome. [Variety]